October 2013 speaking calendar

How do you do, fellow kids? I’ve spent most of this year working on the “Against the smart city” pamphlet, and now that I’ve just shipped the final copy, my life gets back to normal. Which, of course, means “back to crazy”:

– On October 2nd, I’ll be keynoting Merck’s Displaying Futures symposium in Seoul, alongside the splendid Meejin Yoon and Eric Höweler. I can’t quite tell whether or not the event itself is open to the public, but if you happen to be in Seoul between the 30th of September and the 4th of October, we should totally have chicken and beer.

A few weeks later (hopefully, after I’ve recovered a little bit) I fly down to Brazil for two very special events:

I’m super-excited about that for two reasons. The first is that my session is called “Harnessing Resistance: Anger as Untapped Capital,” and it’s being billed as a conversation between Teddy Cruz and myself on “how resistance brings people together and the roles that the urban environment and social media play in turning an uprising into a movement” — hugely potent topic there, obviously. The second is the very brütal SESC Pompeia itself.

Brazil itself I haven’t set foot in since I was a skinny kid in a Fugazi t-shirt in 1990, and that was several lifetimes ago for the country as well as for me. In the years since, I’ve more than occasionally found myself electrified by what’s happening there, whether that meant the considerable creative ferment of Brazil’s informal sector (any interest in which latterly tends to be dismissed as “favela chic”); a line of pungent, occasionally hard to watch films; or the efforts of a generation of innovators working at the intersection of technology and politics — the work of Felipe Fonseca and MetaReciclagem, say, or the folks who organize the Novas Cartografias conference. So to say that I’m looking forward to my return, and to conversations with some of the amazing people responsible, would be something of an understatement.

Finally, I’m not at liberty to say just what this is about yet, but if you’ll be in NYC and you’re interested in questions of technology, design and public space…you may want to keep the evening of November 6th clear. In the meantime, I’ll get back with you more or less imminently with information about the pamphlet, where and how to get it, and so on.